Emma Watson Dealt with “animals, water, stunts, CGI” and Giving Birth on the Set of ‘Noah’

It’s been three years since Emma Watson hung up her Hogwarts hat and headed to more indie fare in movies like My Week with Marilyn and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. However, she’s returned to her big blockbuster roots on March 28 by playing Ila in Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah.

The 23-year-old spoke to Reuters about how her time with the Harry Potter franchise prepared her for the wet and difficult set of the Biblical tale.

She shared, “I remember being on set and Darren was saying, ‘Okay, the water is going to be cold, we’re probably going to be here for a full day, try and conserve your energy between takes, like keep warm and make sure you eat properly. This is going to be physically very demanding.’ For a minute I felt very intimidated and then there’s something about having done those Harry Potter films and they were very physical. We did a lot of stuff in Scotland. It was freezing cold, filming at four in the morning, working crazy hours.”

However, Watson did find some positive elements to the drawbacks of the challenging set.

She continued, “It’s kind of comforting in a way to know that in some senses, nothing will be as hard as that again, and I’m pretty prepared for most things people can throw at me, whether it be animals, water, stunts, CGI (computer-generated imagery), whatever it is. It was a very good school in a way and set me up very well for this kind of environment and this kind of pressure.”

Her role as a mom-to-be also required a bit of research on how to make giving birth realistic on film.

“I actually didn’t do a lot of reading, but I did a lot a research because I become a mother in the story, and obviously have never given birth myself. That required quite a lot of careful thinking. Darren and I had this conversation where we both agreed that in so many films, women give birth and it looks like they’re barely breaking a sweat. We wanted it to feel very raw, very real and so I took it pretty seriously,” she explained.